Wash your hands, cover your mouth and nose when you cough and sneeze, stay home from work (even if you’re afraid of losing your job) and school if you are unwell and avoid large crowds.

By that the Centers for Disease Control must mean the long lines forming in the South Bay for swine flu vaccines and, especially, drugstores.

Sick people go to drugstores. Take Saturday, when I was caught in a Sonny Corleone-style virus ambush. The cashier had hit one of those time-stopping moments where nobody gets checked out until someone who is at lunch comes to unhinge the cash register.

In front of me was a green-snot-spraying kid in his mom’s ample arms while a woman stood just behind me sneezing and hacking until her partner demanded, “Would you at least go back there and get a surgical mask!”

A bit tart, yes. But I wasn’t surprised given mankind’s abiding love of the sick and needy.

During the 14th-century plague epidemics in Europe, parents abandoned their stricken children and vice versa. And helpless families were bricked up inside their own homes to avoid contagion thought to be spread by swamp gas, lack of piety, black magic, members of unpopular religions and – my favorite – cats.

And there was no CDC back then to tell us about rat-borne fleas and the difference between an epidemic (“a widespread outbreak of an infectious disease”) and the much more Hollywood-sounding pandemic. That’s “an epidemic spread over a wide geographic area.”

Still, it’s nice that we stick with the word influenza, a word that originated in Italy with the first recorded flu epidemic in 1173. Influenza, hold on to your scientific jargon caps, means “influence.” The leading scientists of the day believed that this terrible coughing, sneezing, aching, wheezing, sometimes life-ending dreadfulness was brought on by the influence of the stars in the winter sky and not by a serf coughing on your daily bread.

Virus, by the way, is Latin for toxin or poison.

And I take it as a sign of this dreadful season that a little kid showed up at our door on Saturday night dressed in an array of colorful balloons proclaiming, “I’m the swine flu!”

I’m surprised nobody doused the urchin in Clorox.

But seriously, viruses are scary, microscopic, edge-of-life – somehow neither dead nor undead – shape-shifting thingees that can’t do anything without a host. While all it can do with a host is make it sick or dead.

You probably know (the CDC has explained it only a million times) that H1N1 means that this virus strain possesses eight strands of dumb-as-a-bag-of-hair RNA wrapped in the same types of two key proteins, hemagglutinin and neuraminidase.

I hope that you’re paying attention.

If you believe that God gave us the intelligence to develop anti-viral medication and vaccines, then it would have to be the opposite of God that gave us a non-organism that can start out as one thing and quickly (because it makes such poor copies of itself) become something even worse.

Or not worse, as seen during the not-great swine flu outbreak of 1976. The discovery of 200 cases led to a Gerald Ford-promoted, $137 million program that inoculated 40 million Americans before vanishing completely. Or completely if you don’t count the 500 people who came down with the possibly-vaccine-caused Guillain-Barre syndrome that killed 50 and cost the government millions more in damages.

Or much, much worse, as with the 1918 pandemic – long thought to be a swine flu but later confirmed as an avian type – that killed approximately 50 million people worldwide.

Or not quite as worse by comparison only. I am, of course, talking about the 1957 Asian flu (H2N2) and the 1968 Hong Kong flu (H3N2) that each wiped out 2 million people worldwide.

Then there’s just normal, regular “influence,” the so-called seasonal flu that kills 39,000 people each year without ever making the evening news. Which doesn’t sound like much of anything unless one of that number happens to me someone you love. Or worse, me.

Having very nearly died during the epidemic of 1957, I knew the score watching “60 Minutes” on Sunday night as doctors struggled to intubate a 15-year-old boy suffering from swine flu.

The only “good” thing about an illness that is hitting youngsters (90 percent of cases are in people under 65 instead of the usual other way around) is how we managed to avoid the “Mexican flu” moniker or the French-suggested “novel flu,” a name that only led to ordering confusion in Paris restaurants.

Then I had to hear this from leading virus expert Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Michigan: “I know less about influenza today than I did 10 years ago.”

Meanwhile, vaccine production trails demand, causing anxious moments for parents of small children, for vulnerable pregnant women and for the men and women said to be visiting free inoculation sites dressed as pregnant women.

But the fact that this is said to be a mild flu that will cause only normal discomfort for the vast majority of cases hasn’t halted a steady stream of e-mails from readers who see something far more sinister at work.

One man called it a “government attempt at population control” while another wrote, “The government is spreading flu and flu symptoms. If enough people become ill, the state will take the power to quarantine anyone they want to prison camps to keep `we the people’ safe. This is a ruse to launch a police state. Look it up online.”

I did.

That’s where I found out that we need to wash our hands and cover our faces when we sneeze or cough.

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